Cardinal Sin
by California smells funny
Summary: Blackadder Goes Forth, after Goodbyeee. Blackadder and Darling discover that the afterlife isn't completely different from what went before. Slight slash. Oneshot.


**Cardinal Sin**

"So there's no Purgatory? Shame. I was rather looking forward to a dip in Heaven's hot springs."

That was the last thing Edmund Blackadder had said to the officious angel with a clipboard who had met him here. Until he had noticed the wings, he had been hoping he was in a field hospital – an unusual and very effective one, as he was clean, unhurt, and surrounded by fluffy clouds rather than bloody mud, but still a work of the living. But no. He was, as the angel had informed him, in an anteroom just outside the Pearly Gates, and they needed to find his file.

It had been quite a blow to discover that Heaven was just as bureaucratic as the Western Front. So since the angel had cleared off to look through the divine filing system, Blackadder had been standing around, somewhat bored, and almost wishing for company, for what might well have been the first time in his life.

"We'll have to do some paperwork, Darling." Those words, spoken on the other side of the room, were the first indication he had that he was no longer alone. A smirk hovered on his lips as he wondered if he had heard right, and one of the bureaucratic banes of his former life had, as it were, now been impaled on his own pen.

"That's _Captain _Darling!" Yes, he had heard right. There was no mistaking that voice.

He looked up. The angel who had spoken first was on his way out, leaving a surprisingly blank-faced Kevin Darling. There was no sign of his sneer, even when he realised Blackadder was there. Instead, he looked numb. Even the insistence on his rank seemed only to have been the product of habit. Blackadder cleared his throat. "You might want to stop that, Darling. Heaven and Sons aren't too fond of the military. Rather goes against their ethos of good leadership. Oh, and not killing things."

The response was half-hearted, with little real feeling behind it. "Go to Hell, Blackadder."

"Well, I'd sooner do that than stay here for another six hours while they look for the rather large ledger entitled 'Things Edmund Blackadder Has Weaselled Out Of'."

Darling blinked, taken aback. "Don't you _want _to go to Heaven?"

"What, all those men in dresses, harps, ambrosia, people reciting the sort of tripe that idiot Brooke was coming out with back in the trenches? Nah. That seems more like –" He stopped, for once deciding to hold back on the retort on his tongue. "...So you _do_, Darling?"

"Well, yes! Would you really prefer the torments of Hell?"

"You clearly haven't shared a trench with Lieutenant George and Baldrick for three years," Blackadder told him calmly, picking some nonexistent mud from under one of his fingernails. "After that, Hell will be a blast."

"You're not even taking this seriously, are you?"

"No, not really. I've never taken things seriously – why start now?"

"This is the rest of your _life _we're talking..." The sentence died on his lips as he noticed how ludicrous his choice of words was.

"Darling?"

When Darling replied, his voice had dropped to a whisper. "We're _dead_, Blackadder. This is _it_. Think of all the things we've done, the chances we missed. Isn't that worth taking seriously?"

"To be quite frank, I'm not sure as I've much of a choice. When they find that ledger, it's pip-pip, toodle-oo, off to Hell for me." Blackadder's tone was completely deadpan, until he looked at the other man's face, and his voice softened unexpectedly. "...You're afraid, Darling."

"Yes, yes I am! And you're a bloody fool not to be."

"I'm a realist. I haven't lived like you, you see. If I wanted to do something – or someone – then I did. Why not? I never really thought this lot existed." As he spoke, he gestured around them with an expression of mild distaste.

"I did," Darling muttered miserably.

"Some people would have envied you for that, you know – that certainty. Not me."

"No?"

"No. I got forty-odd years as a hedonist – when I got the chance, at least – and you got forty-odd years of denial and fear. Did you _ever _give in to what you wanted?"

There flashed across his vision fragments of his last hours, first begging at Melchett's feet as he indulged his desire to escape, then... Alone in the dugout with his fellow captain, when he had truly acted on his desires. He closed his eyes, wanting to see more of the images even as he felt shame wash over him.

"No point praying now, Darling," Blackadder said, the slightly acidic edge still present in his voice even now. "Why send a telegram to someone in the next room?"

His answer came only with difficulty. "...Do you remember? In the dugout, when the Lieutenant and the Private went out, before the order came?"

The memory, half-effaced by the horror of No-Man's Land and the boredom of the waiting room, surfaced slowly in Blackadder's mind. He swallowed. In the time since their paths has first crossed, he had been forced to conclude that whatever else the other captain might have been, he was probably the only sane man Blackadder knew. So if he couldn't attribute events in the dugout to insanity, he supposed that must have been Darling giving in. "...Oh. I suppose you did."

That concession had been given in the softest tone he had ever heard from Blackadder, and tears began to well up in his eyes. That was when a door opened across the room, and he scrubbed the tears away with the end of his pristine sleeve. As he did so, two angels entered, one carrying a single sheet of paper that looked like the memos he had been so familiar with at HQ, the other heaving a large crate.

The angel with the memo approached him and read from the paper. "Darling, Kevin. Oh dear, Darling. Says here you initiated physical intimacy with a male companion. Is that right?"

Darling's eye twitched. Words failed him.

The angel gave him a questioning, slightly impatient look. "No, really, Darling. We weren't really concentrating at that point. So is that correct?"

Seeing Heaven slipping away, Darling floundered. Then, to his amazement, Blackadder jumped in. "Ah, no. I was the... 'companion', and I forced him. I am, in fact, a whoopsie."

Darling gaped.

The angel peered at Blackadder's face for a moment, seemed to accept the story, and dropped the memo on top of the crate.

His colleague looked down at the crate, then up at Blackadder. "Do you even need me to say it, Blackudder?"

At that moment, he noticed that the crate was in fact labelled 'Things Out Of Which Edmund Blackudder Has Weaselled'. Immediately there sprung to mind a witticism about pedants who got their basic facts wrong – then it occurred to him that Darling might be right about taking this seriously. He sighed. "Black_adder_."

"Enjoy Hell, Mr Blackudder," the angel said blithely, and opened a door to reveal a long and dark flight of stairs.

Blackadder gave in, but paused at the door, and looked over his shoulder at Darling, who was watching him, wide-eyed. "...Goodbye, Darling. You've wasted enough opportunities." And he stepped through.

The angel swiftly closed the door behind him and hefted the crate out the same way he and his colleague had come in.

Darling still stared after Blackadder. "Will he be alright?"

"Why do you care, after what he _forced _you to do?" asked the angel who had brought the memo, a hint of teasing in his voice.

His eye twitched again. "...I'm loving my neighbour."

The angel smiled. "He'll be fine. The Devil's always looking for reprobates who can make him laugh. Just wait till he ties Field Marshal Haig to a chair and puts a potty on his head."

"But Haig's not dead!"

"It's just a matter of time." Opening the door through which the other angel had left, Darling's angel gestured through it. "Shall we?"

One more time, he glanced back at the other door.

"He'll be fine," the angel said softly, and patted Darling on the shoulder. "You first."

Turning around with great reluctance, Darling obeyed.

The angel lingered for a few moments, shaking his head. He'd have to go and find the crate now so he could add 'lying to Saint Peter'. He was quite willing to keep this somehow sad man with the unfortunate facial tic, though; he knew affection when he saw it, he knew sacrifice, and that had to count for something.


End file.
